The first six weeks
Sleep, feeding, the 4am rotation, and where your job actually starts and hers ends.
In progress6 min @ 250 wpm↓ 1,135 words
§ Journey
Sleep, feeding, the 4am rotation, and where your job actually starts and hers ends.
Day four was the hardest. Not day one, not day two. Day four, when the adrenaline ran out and the milk came in and we both understood, properly, that this was not a visit. He was staying.
The first six weeks are a tunnel. You go in one person and come out another. The tunnel has no clock and no windows. You eat when you can and sleep when she does and the days lose their names.
Here is the shape of it.
The first week is a haze. Friends will visit. They will bring food, which is helpful, and opinions, which are not. Limit visits to thirty minutes. Do not host. You are not entertaining. You are surviving.
In the first week:
Your main jobs in week one:
This is the week most men feel useless. You are not useless. You are the infrastructure. She is doing the impossible thing. You are making the impossible thing slightly less impossible.
If she is breastfeeding, your role is logistics. Water, food, pillows, snacks, podcast in her ear at 3am. You are not feeding the baby but you are absolutely part of the feed.
If she is bottle-feeding, formula or expressed, you are on the rotation. Half the feeds are yours. This is non-negotiable in our house and I would suggest it in yours.
If she is combo-feeding (both), you take the bottle feeds and she takes the breast feeds, and you split the night based on what is sustainable.
Things to know:
The 4am feed is the one that breaks people. You are at the bottom of your sleep curve. Baby is wide awake. The house is silent and the world feels far away.
What works:
If you are working, the temptation is to claim you cannot do nights. Resist this. Do at least three nights a week, more on weekends. The damage of being the only one not sleeping in a marriage takes years to repair. The damage of being a tired worker takes a coffee.
There is no fixed list. Bodies are different, recoveries are different, feeding choices are different. But there is a principle.
She is recovering from a major physical event. For six weeks (or twelve, or longer if it was a caesarean or a tear), her body is healing. Her hormones are doing extraordinary things. She is producing food, possibly, with her own body.
You are not recovering. You are tired, but you are not injured.
So:
If she is breastfeeding through the night, your job is the daytime stretches and everything that is not the feed.
Newborns do not sleep in blocks longer than three hours, often shorter. This is biological, not a parenting failure. They will not sleep through the night for months. Anyone who tells you their baby slept through at six weeks is either lying or has a unicorn. Mostly lying.
What helps:
What does not help:
You will lose weight or gain weight. You will get sick around week three. Your back will hurt from carrying and rocking. Your wrists may develop a kind of tendinitis from holding a small head at an awkward angle for hours.
Watch yourself for:
Paternal postnatal depression is real and under-diagnosed. About one in ten new fathers experience it. If it is more than a bad week, talk to your GP. Beyond Blue and PANDA both have free helplines.
Around week six something shifts. Baby starts to smile, properly, not wind. The feeds become predictable. You sleep three hours in a row and wake up feeling like you have slept eight. The fog lifts a little.
You will not remember most of these six weeks clearly. That is the brain protecting you. What you will remember is whether you were there.
Be there. Do the nights. Take the load.
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